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Server cloning in VMware ESX without virtual center

Tuesday May 29th 2007, 12:29 pm
Filed under: vmware

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As a consultant I sometimes run into smaller customers that really like the bare bone virtualization technology that VMware ESX provides and buy the starter edition (which comes pretty cheap)
The problem with the starter edition is that you do not get a lot of the cool features that comes with the ESX enterprise edition and virtual center, but the costs from the starter edition to a full blown enterprise edition with virtual center is pretty big for some of my smaller customers.

One of the features missing is the ability to clone your virtual machines or creating virtual machines from templates in an easy way. A cheap and pretty simple way to get this functionality is to use the (free) VMware Converter 3.0 product.

Here it the procedure for cloning a windows 2003 VM for example

1. Create a VM (a “master” image) of a Windows 2003 installation in ESX and make sure it’s shutdown

2. Download VMware converter and install it on a windows computer (vista is not supported yet !) Link to download

3. Download the MS sysprep tools from MS and unpack them (in this case windows 2003 Link)

4. Open the VMware converter and click on “Import machine” this will start the “VMware converter Import Wizard”

5. Choose As the source machine your ESX server and select your master image

6. Choose as the destination server your ESX server

7. Customize the machine’s computer name (sid), ip address, etc (here you are asked for the location of the sysprep files from step 2)

and your done !

Please be aware that the windows vm image is copied over the network from the ESX to the computer running the converter and back to the ESX server, so it can take some time (depending on your network speed, disk read speed etc.)

I will post a more detailed guide with some screenshots pretty soon.

rg
Stefan Schuller